The county will hold an auction Sept. 27 to collect millions of dollars in delinquent taxes owed for two years or more to towns and boroughs, schools and the county itself.
The Chester County Tax Claim Bureau has published a list of 1,100 properties that ranges from large ones whose owners owe tens of thousands of
dollars to mobile homes whose owners owe just a few hundred. Their common bond is that they will lose their property if it goes to auction.
On the published list are Rouse & Associates, which owes $77,256 on properties in East and West Whiteland; Mark Rowan and his partners, who owe $57,221 on properties in East Bradford and East and West Goshen; the Donahue- Giunta Partnership, which owes $105,880 on properties in West Goshen and West Chester; the Linpro Weingartner partnership, which owes $56,286 on Easttown property; Arthur Weiler, who owes $55,665 on St. Peter's Village in Warwick, and Red Wing Associates, which owes $148,111 on steel mill property in Phoenixville.
Among the largest delinquencies initially listed was $398,561 owed by Samuel Rappaport of Philadelphia for the Sharpless Historical Works apartment complex in West Chester.
But Rappaport's property, like hundreds of others, was removed from the pending auction because he agreed to pay 25 percent of delinquent taxes, fees and interest immediately and the rest during the coming years.
The payment plan for tax delinquents, permitted by state law, means the property remains with the delinquent while the bulk of the tax debt is rolled over.
Such a rollover, and the resulting one-year wait before another auction, has drawn criticism from those who say developers know they have several years of grace before government agencies get serious about actually selling their property in a tax sale. In effect, the unpaid taxes are borrowed from the township, school system and county.
One critic of rollovers is Alan Portnoff, whose law firm hires out to local governments to force delinquents to pay up.
"There are some people who use delinquent taxes as a bank and will continue to string them out as long as they can," he said in an earlier interview.
But County Tax Collector Stanley Szymborski says the system works. Most of the tax bills already have a 10 percent late penalty added on by the taxing agency - township, school system or county.
The bureau adds another three-quarters of a percent interest each
month, or 9 percent a year, and $35 to $75 for advertising or posting the property.
